This is a particularly interesting to me because it was published in the month I was born.

In a lot of ways these people were exactly right about the problems of today, if not the will or ability of people to make the needed changes. Wealth inequality is getting worse, not better. There is a nascent back-to-the-cities movement, but suburbs, which are so environmentally wasteful, are still occupying ever larger swathes of the country. And people, or at least people in power still don’t care about reducing energy consumption.

We haven’t had the energy crunch they predicted yet, but climate change requires almost the same types of societal changes to combat and we just haven’t seen it.

Asimov nails the “global village” (internet) and instant communication with anyone at any time. Though for all my hyper-localized social media, I still don’t know the names of any of the people on my floor let alone the rest of my building.

I really liked Buckminster Fuller’s quote: “We have typewriters sleeping with the good plumbing and we have people sleeping in the slums.”. It does point out the glaring inefficiency if huge parts of our society. Say one thing about Foxconn, they don’t have this problem. It does seem wasteful to have all of this infrastructure that just sits idle at night.

Five Noted Thinkers Explore the Future

ARE the suburbs dead? Will there be an economic resurgence of our inner cities? Will larger and larger units of government take more and more control over land use? Is mankind in general entering an era of greater affluence, of new and different attitudes toward land ownership? Is the oil crisis a blessing in disguise?

Artist’s Idea of the “City of Tomorrow,” Constructed of Glass in Steel Frames; a Practical Process for This Work Is Being Used in Building a New York Filling Station, Similar to the One Shown in the Foreground; the Glass Walls Lend Themselves to Unusual Lighting Effects

Ignoring the actual content of the article, I would just like to point out that “more than 10,000″ is not “countless”. It’s actually a pretty specific number.

Also, read the “Report From the Future” on the second page to learn Hugo Gernsback’s plan to cure racial tension in the U.S. by turning all the black people white.

DOCTOR RESTORES “LOST VIRGINITY”

The unusual story of a doctor who has “re-created” more than 10,000 virgins.

Countless brides in Japan say they owe their happy marriage to Dr. Kohei Matsukubo, a 50-year-old plastic surgeon of Tokyo. More than 10,000 operations have been performed by this doctor to give women (including some Western women) new hymens. His story was told recently in the Canadian publication Chinatown News by Robert Metcalfe.

Why is his dream of the future that men will be fully mature at 10 years of age? Does he not like children? Or like them too much?

DREAMS of the FUTURE

A Guest Editorial

THREE centuries ago, Francis Bacon tried the world’s first experiment in the popularization of science. He spun a yarn, “The New Atlantis,” an account of the inventions some shipwrecked sailors found on an imaginary island.

Bacon thought it would be a grand novelty to have folks travel in carriages without horses, sail without sails, and go under water; fly somewhat like birds, be cured by salt baths, and drink sea water from which the salt had been filtered. Most of these ” dreams have since come true.

The telephone network is the nervous system of our civilization, carrying messages of demand and direction, of pain and pleasure, to collective enterprises and to individuals alike. The telephone itself is a mere end-organ which enables any of us to make use of billions of dollars worth of complex switching and transmission equipment.

A new car is a complete means of transportation, but a new telephone can be only a small alteration in a massive electronic organism that seems to change with glacial slowness. For this reason it is far easier to see what sort of advances in telephony are technologically possible than to say when they may actually take place, and I doubt if anyone can make detailed predictions concerning the future.

Shape of things to come? Even as Apollo and orbiting Skylab recede into history, American scientists consider a more awesome enterprise—a permanent colony in space.

By ISAAC ASIMOV Paintings by PIERRE MION

I DID NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND what L-5 was like, on this July day in A.D. 2026, until I no longer saw it from my vantage point in space.

On the shuttle flight I had observed by telescope the torus that we all recognize, much like a bicycle wheel, gleaming in the direct light of the sun and in the light reflected from the large mirror floating free above. The six spokes and the central hub were visible too, of course.

During the next 10 years the world will see changes dramatic as those introduced by the industrial revolution. Technicological progress will be equal in this period to that of any previous five decades, and in its wake will come new problems. If man can foresee and meet these challenges, our way of life in 10 years could be amazingly different.

by Leo Cherne

The progress of these next 10 years will be as dramatic, as filled with change, as jampacked with impact for American business in the total American community as any 50 years in the entire development of civilized man.

The fastest speed a human being has ever traveled is roughly 25,000 mph (Apollo astronauts). Speed of light in a vacuum is 670,616,629 mph so they were only off by a factor of 27,000 or so.

SCIENCE LOOKS AHEAD TO 2000 A.D.

When a development engineer like myself looks into the future and tries to explain what he sees, he begins to sound more like a science-fiction writer than a development engineer.

By the year 2000, for instance, it is entirely possible that we may have spaceships which can travel at a speed approaching the speed of light. This would put us in a position to examine some of the fantastic implications of Einstein’s theories.

You’ve probably read scores of so-called scientific fiction stories, but the chances are you don’t know why most of these tales can’t possibly come true. Mr. Harris sets forth here the scientific objections to fantastic projects such as transporting a human being by radio and rocketing to Mars.